Quotes from Lindsey Buckingham

As autobiographical as say the stuff on 'Rumours' was, I don't think we thought of it as such when we were writing it.

I liked 'Rumours,' but to me, there was some point where the focus became the sales, not the music.

Sometimes I wish we were the Eagles. That's one thing they've always been able to do is want the same thing for the same reasons.

'Tusk' was clearly a line in the sand that I drew.

I didn't take lessons, and I don't know my scales.

I think when you work alone - the way I do it, anyway - you could sort of liken it to painting, where there's sort of a one-on-one with the canvas.

When I work alone, my process is like painting. With Fleetwood Mac, it's more like movie making.

If you are gonna participate in a band, you've got to be a band member in good standing, and you've got to think about the needs of the whole.

I seldom look back.

I'm in the position where I don't have to make commercial music to feed myself, so I have the luxury of being more experimental, if that's what I choose to do. I guess I've earned the right by being in the business for a while and paying the dues and taking the lumps.

I don't practice per se. I learned to play on my own, taught myself how to play. I've never really had a lesson, and I don't read music. So all the stuff that I do doesn't come from the normal set of disciplines that they teach you where you sit down and run through scales for a particular number of minutes a day.

There is a real joy to be able to get up and react to each other and appreciate the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, just the chemistry of the group.

My personal life is fairly barren.

I'm not ashamed of my personal life.

When I was a kid, and Elvis Presley broke through to a middle class, white audience, it was a sociological phenomenon that lasted through the Beatles and even a bit through Fleetwood Mac.

Arcade Fire seems to be doing very well; certainly, Phoenix is doing very well.

They tried to get me to use a pick when I first joined the band. They had certain things they thought were appropriate. I tried to adapt as much as I could.

Some days I would be there at ten in the morning and wouldn't leave till ten at night, and the others would waltz in for a couple of hours and then leave, because I was doing that painting thing. And they were happy to see that being done.

Warner Bros. never really got behind the solo work. They always kind of drew a blank. I think they always were thinking, 'Well, this is nice, but let's get back to what's really important.'

I always made the joke that I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Warner Brothers first put 'Tusk' on and listened to it in their boardroom as a follow-up to 'Rumours.'

My center is not really my singing so much as my guitar playing.

Fleetwood Mac was one big lesson in adaptation for me. There were five very different personalities, and I suppose that made it great for a while.

I lost my power in the world because I did not use it.

The writing is all done, so it's all about verbalizing everything from point A to point B, and certainly there's a bit of politics involved, so it's a different thing.